Reading TFA, it states "The 1st Circuit said a new judge assigned to the case could reduce the award again, but the record labels would then be entitled to a new trial."
A new trial, even if only for damages, is the last thing the record labels should want. Each new trial increases the odds that some jury will award a token amount in effect removing effective civil sanction. Given that Jammie Thomas-Rasset had her penalty reduced to $54,000, it is likely even a new judge will reduce the penalty to well below $80,000. That's not an amount that will destroy someone like Joel Tenenbaum's life, especially since he's now a public figure and comes from what appears to be a relatively well-off family. At worst the penalty will be reduced to $70,000 and the RIAA will simply have to take that amount versus going to a new trial.
Considering that Joel Tenenbaum has now achieved some notoriety with this case, it is simply a matter of monetizing one's 15 minutes of fame. I don't think he will come close to monetizing it to $1 million, but I also suspect he won't have much of a problem monetizing his fame to basically feel no pain at all from the penalty. Note that in this worst-case scenario Tenenbaum pays the fine but has no other obligation, versus a settlement where the RIAA could demand he goes away forever and never speak in public of his experiences again. Writing a book, giving talks against the RIAA, all of these would remain open to him.
One may object that maybe Tenenbaum is not in this to monetize fame, but from my experience, the last thing serious research scientists at the beginning of their careers want is unrelated distractions. There are papers to publish, conferences to attend, jobs to apply for, etc. He must be getting something from this trial even at risk of this penalty to make the time spent well worth his while.
Relative to most other nations of the world, Holland is relatively well-run, and the Dutch are as capable of fixing such problems as anyone else.
Could the Dutch have an advantage that is somewhat a geographic accident, in that since the Middle Ages they have benefited from having an excellent source of Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D from herring? But the Dutch may have contributed to their own fortune by preparing and consuming herring in a manner that preserves nutrients. Note that under the section in Wikipedia describing pickled herring are listed several Northern European countries that are doing well and other groups with noted individuals of exceptional intelligence.
Once upon a time there was a country Germany that had the world leading technology in maglev trains. Unfortunately while the Germans had the technology, due to their regulatory system they could not actually build the systems in their own country, so they shopped their technology to a country that could, China.
The Chinese paid for building one demonstration system in Shanghai and seemed to be interested in paying for more maglev business from the Germans. Unfortunately after "public protests" of radiation further projects kept getting delayed so nothing was actually built. Then the Chinese developed their own maglev technology and no longer needed the Germans. The end.
On page 4 of Kenneth H. Rosen, Richard R. Rosinski, James M. Farber, and Douglas A. Host, UNIX System V Release 4: An Introduction, 2nd Edition, the subsection titled "Open Source Code" has the following first two sentences:
"The source code for the UNIX System, and not just the executable code, has been made available to users and programmers. Because of this, many people have been able to adapt the UNIX System in different ways. This openness has led to the introduction of a wide range of new features and versions customized to meet special needs."
The book by Rosen et al. cited above is has year of copyright 1996. There is apparently an earlier edition from 1990. This is no ordinary book by obscure authors--it was considered as one of the "bibles" for its subject at its time and would have been familiar to many. Already in the above description there are the crucial concepts of the importance of source code availability and adaptability.
No, the most predictable thing on Slashdot is posters who don't read the articles and who parrot the most popular opinion.
The article doesn't mention anything resembling terrorism as the reason. What the article discusses in some detail is that the Japanese ruling political party, the LDP, has ruled the country virtually unchallenged for decades. The slightest bit of thought shows that the LDP has achieved almost every single goal of what the most progressive Democrats are advocating in the United States: universal health care, effective mass transit, a constitutional ban against the use of the military except to defend the nation, unparalleled Internet connectivity and infrastructure, all within the framework of a liberal democracy. (And for many environmentalists, Japan has achieved the ideal of negative population growth.) As part of the system that rules Japan, college entrance exams are used as a filter to establish that those who ascend to rule Japan are part of a meritocracy. This and not terrorism is the context of Japanese concerns to save the children. As has been discussed by the Christian Science Monitor, the Japanese are probably far more willing to accept Internet filtering to protect the children out of fear of web sites that discuss topics such as group suicides.
And given that the Japanese system works better than almost any other in the world (only a few Western European nations even have an argument), a response of apathetic indifference by the majority ruled by that system is indeed perfectly rational and defensible. The bloggers who fear being censored represent the malcontents, the rejects, the people who were not quite good enough, the people who have not demonstrated their ability to responsibly maintain what the Japanese system has built to the envy of the rest of the world.
Not so funny candidate--Christine Boskoff
on
Darwin Awards 2006
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So why isn't Christine Boskoff going to be the clear winner for a Darwin Award? The person might have been extremely intelligent, but what can one say about a plan to climb remote mountains in China with only one companion and no method of communication to the outside world for weeks? As the Christine Boskoff Wikipedia article notes, she did not even leave word of where she was going so that potential rescue teams would have no idea where to find her.
So why is it funny when probably uneducated people do something stupid while it isn't funny for someone who used to be an "electrical engineer working for Lockheed Aeronautical in Georgia", "a pilot", and who "designed software for a lighted control display for the C-130J" to do something equally stupid to eliminate herself from the gene pool? Articles I have read such as the above article from 2002 indicate she had no children, so Christine Boskoff removed herself from the gene pool through her stupid actions. Evidently being a former electrical engineer and then becoming a mountain climber/entrepreneur is something that Darwinian evolution selects against. (Even her former husband killed himself in 1999.) So why aren't we all laughing at that?
Christina Sormani has a web page explaining why Penny Smith is likely to have solved the Millenium Problem on the Navier-Stokes equation. Smith's paper is the culmination of a lifetime of research similar to how Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was a logical outcome of his previous research. This is not someone coming from out of nowhere providing a proof that has nothing to do with his or her prior specialty.
The debate is now over. Penny Smith has shown that there is in fact no variance between men and women that predisposes men to have the very top mathematicians. In fact the proof that environment trumps genetics has been demonstrated in the United States over the past decades: males born in the United States have been judged by government and industry to not be good enough in top-level mathematics which is why so much talent has to be imported from other countries. The United States is probably going to follow the path of the United Kingdom where cultural factors are causing boys mathematical achievement in school to collapse relative to that of girls.
Looking at product manuals for portable travel routers, I see lots of claims about "stateful packet inspection firewalls" and "NAT", but these only apply when the router is being used to share an Internet connection with the ethernet port connected not to one's laptop but to say a hotel's room connection.
Is there any of these products that does the following: I plug my laptop into the router's ethernet port, I am able to configure the router through its web interface, the router connects to a wireless access point, the router then functions as a router for my laptop providing hardware firewall services?
My dream machine (although it turned out to not be a machine) as a kid would have been an EVA from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I would not have had a qualm about even killing another kid if given an order to do so if obeying such orders was the price of being an EVA pilot. The power to level cities, and if in EVA Unit 01, power without limit, would be in my opinion the most common modern dream in the post video game younger generation, not peacefully flying on a jet-powered glider.
Nausicaa was a scientist who performed careful experiments that led her to her ultimate conclusions about the role of the deadly fungus and forest in the ecology of the post-apocalyptic world. Genre fiction since then has generally preferred to reject science as the mode of enlightenment, preferring anything else from heredity to magic.
I guess this point I am more a cynic about what young people really want if freed from the thin vaneer of civilization, similar to the philosophy of Lord of the Flies.
Let's step back and consider why is it that things are the way they are. Telecom regulation is but one facet of various reforms that need to be carried out, but for some reason are not in most cases.
I argue that Francis Fukuyama completely misread what he called "The End of History"--the late 20th century was not the triumph of what he called liberal democracy but its rejection. The 21st century then will be various countries dealing with the consequences.
Western Europe I would argue is re-creating not the Roman Empire but the Catholic Church, only a secular version in its bureacracy. Thus Europe's new Church will once again be the fusion of the functions of moral guidance, legal enforcement, and scientific research.
The United States has no historic fallback position and will simply continue to deteriorate in the effectiveness of its regulation of anything. There is period of its history that could be used to revitalize it, but it is generally forbidden to teach that a major plank of the Progressive movement was greatly restricted immigration.
The central Indian belief appears to me to be fatalism, which has advantages in that there is no illusion that there is any chance of fair outcomes for the masses. However fatalism is not exactly the most conducive philosophy for summoning the national will to have a functioning government.
But the country in the strongest position is China, for its defining literature is free of the illusions that plagued both the Catholic Church and its successor the European bureacracy, the confusion that what is moral has to agree with what is true. China will be led by people who, even if they have not read the work, are influenced by the ideas of works such as Romance of Three Kingdoms.
I suggest the Chinese idea of the cycle of rise and decline of empire is at its heart a protest against what seemed to be the deadlock that the only people who had the power to end hereditary rule were the people who when they achieved power would simply reimpose it to favor their own offspring. If the current regime has solved that problem then it will be China that has the greatest alignment of its form of government with the truth and not what one wishes to be true. For the Chinese are the ones who feel the least constraint towards the sacrifice of oceans of blood to achieve the needs of the state.
Debian/kFreeBSD has its web site's pages copyrighted by SPI, web pages which mention that "Debian" is a registered trademark without mentioning the status of "FreeBSD".
But the people I blame are the directors of the FreeBSD Foundation which now owns the FreeBSD trademark at least as far as it applies to "CD ROMs featuring an archive of computer programs which may be accessed for use archived on a CDROM." (And it appears the FreeBSD Foundation is working to expand the applicability of the FreeBSD trademark.) But there is already a Debian/kFreeBSD iso.
Considering that a simple cease and desist was sufficient to force CentOS to scrub references on its web site to the phrase "Red Hat" and other such trademarks (other than apparently a link to someone else's article), I am baffled what either Debian/kFreeBSD or the FreeBSD Foundation is waiting for.
Wrong root cause--the blame lies with the left and their reaction to the Vietnam War, with their one permanent reform the destruction of basic research in United States universities through the Mansfield Amendment. Just go to the musty bookshelves of one's university to the mathematics section and look for books before 1970. Many of them will have an acknowledgement of funding through some agency such as the Office of Navel Research.
The Mansfield Amendment deliberately destroyed the relationship between the United States military and university basic research, so that instead of getting crumbs from a gargantuan Department of Defense budget, which meant the crumbs were quite substantial, basic research had to rely on the politically castrated National Science Foundation with no important constituency to push for funding.
Faced with the prospect of basic research almost completely disappearing, the only alternative was something similar to Bayh-Dole, because there was no way anymore to politically push through explicit funding. What an irony that now what were once considered public goods are now the property of the largest corporations and the rich only get richer. Now that is the true unintended consequence considering who initiated the Mansfield Amendment.
If HP killed the Alpha, explain this press release from Intel dated June 25, 2001, announcing that "Compag will transfer key enterprise processor technology to Intel and consolidate its entire 64-bit server family on the Itanium architecture." Not only was it announced the Alpha processor line was going to be killed, but Compaq management made sure the decision could not be reversed.
According to the press release, there was only going to be one more generation of the the Alpha, and the transition was supposed to be completed by 2004.
Note the bullet point further down in the press release that "Compaq is transferring significant Alpha microprocessor and compiler technology, tools and resources to Intel." As explained further in the press release, "Over the next couple of years, several hundred Compaq microprocessor engineers, compiler experts and infrastructure employees will be offered employment with Intel."
Compaq before the HP merger had agreed with Intel to transfer all of the engineers. There was absolutely nothing HP could have done to have saved the Alpha even if HP had had a sudden conversion and decided to reject the Itanium. HP would have had to have started from scratch with the IP and people already transferred to Intel--it probably would not have been legally possible for HP to have changed direction at that point.
The idea of a censorship-free society is a pure fantasy, and it is the consensus of almost everyone on the planet in the 21st century that some forms of censorship are necessary.
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. For example, see the case of Oriana Fallaci. Now she may or may not be eventually ruled to have committed defamatory speech against Islam, but the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions. As for the case of Europe, I predict this line will be drawn more and more in the direction that no speech critical of Islam will be permitted.
In the 21st century, almost everyone, regardless of civilization, accepts that there is no such principle as the unlimited right to publish any book.
Similarly in the 21st century, there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned. For an example, Belgium's highest court ruled that the Vlaams Blok is racist and banned it from political participation. Again, there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed. In the case of Europe, I predict the line will be drawn where it will be illegal for a political party to advocate anti-immigrant positions.
The environmental movement is a real political movement and actually has politicians pay attention to it from time to time because it can find people who are willing to take on the corporations in a courtroom.
A prime example is the case of the McDonalds libel trial which turned into a major public relations disaster for McDonalds and for the government and which has some aspects still dragging on.
Note that due to the nature of England's libel laws even the pair involved in the litigation knew they had no chance of prevailing at trial; but they chose to sacrifice a huge chunk of their life because the damage done to them is far exceeded by the damage the movement could inflict on McDonalds.
The difference then boils down to this--some people view causes such as the environment as being important enough to sacrifice their lives for. These people and their movement get results. Far fewer seem to feel that the concept of digital rights is important enough to sacrifice one's livelihood. I view the political system we have today is an arena of Darwinism for ideologies--survival of the fittest, the ones that can inspire people to make actual sacrifices.
I learned how cockroaches were naturals for running machines from the movie Godzilla vs Gigan.
The coming copyright violation lawsuit
on
Open source Java?
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· Score: 1
The specs are open but the license file for the API specification specifically grants only the right to implement the entirety of it, and only if the implementation also passes the TCK. There is no other right to use the API specification other than for "internal use" to be able to write programs that are not re-implementations. The effort to achieve total compliance is simply beyond what anyone can achieve without the ability to reach intermediate steps. But those intermediate steps violate the license of the API specification by not being complete.
What should in my opinion be alarming is that Sun has specifically mentioned a Residual Knowledge right for its otherwise "read only" JCK that is not mentioned at all in the license file for the API specification. That means that Sun considers one to have no Residual Knowledge right after having read the API specification. Anyone who reads the API specification is tainted unless the implementation is 100% complete and passes the TCK, which isn't going to happen soon, or ever. This is the same clever strategy that Sun has used of spreading the source code to taint as many developers as possible. And while GNU Classpath and Apache Harmony can probably succeed in documenting that developers aren't tainted from having viewed the source code, there is no way they will be able to argue that all of the developers are also untainted with respect to the having read the API specification.
I think the ground is being laid for a straightforward copyright violation lawsuit to defend the API specification should a release ever be made of either GNU Classpath or Apache Harmony. There is no way either project will achieve complete compliance, and there's only so long they can claim they are "pre-released" products, especially if they are being widely installed and used as dependencies in open source distributions.
You might not think Sun can win such a lawsuit, but it doesn't really matter now does it from an individual developer's perspective if one doesn't have the legal resources to fight back.
So what changed in the license for Java 5?
on
Open source Java?
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· Score: 1
Geir Magnusson Jr. claims in the FAQ that "While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons." Looking at the license files for the API specification of J2SE 5.0 versus J2SE v1.4.2, I'm not sure what the difference is. It seems to me that there is still a requirement that one implement every specified class, and only every specified class, and that one passes the TCK. Apache Harmony claims that they will be able to apply for access to the TCK under the exception for non-profits, but what if Sun doesn't see things their way? Without passing the TCK, a project doesn't seem to have any right to implement the API.
Before implementing the specification exactly and passing the TCK, there can never be an official release of Apache Harmony. I think this project is hopeless.
To paraphrase the new Battlestar Galactica, "The war is over. We lost."
The goal of the RIAA/MPAA isn't to eliminate Internet distribution, it is to preserve their ability to make money off of the content and their monopoly over distribution rights. Unauthorized Internet distribution currently plays into their hands by making their products more popular without giving those distributing it the means to make much money. There is no evidence of a decrease in DVD sales or any other revenue source that feeds RIAA/MPAA profits.
What the RIAA/MPAA really fears is an equivalent of a new Microsoft for content and Internet distribution that would make enough money that it could dictate terms to the RIAA/MPAA. Thanks to unauthorized filesharing of the RIAA and MPAA's most popular products, such a new Microsoft cannot and will not happen. In addition, the ready availability of RIAA/MPAA products to those who desire them but do not wish to pay for them means that no effective political movement can develop to change the laws that would permits others to profit from distribution.
The RIAA and MPAA still have their monopoly over authorized distribution that can make money, and they still have their de facto eternal copyrights. Nothing in the conceivable future is going to change that. They won the war.
I suspect the motivation behind the national ID card is a far-sighted effort by Karl Rove to tend to the health of the Republican Party.
Under the current system, there is enough leakage at the border to allow a flood of illegal immigration into the United States. The Democrats over the next few decades plan to force confrontations at the state level to gradually de facto legalize these immigrants, plus using the political battles to win a huge voting block. I think both Karl Rove and the Democrats for example believe that the victories of anti-illegal immigrant propositions in California paved the way for an backlash that resulted in Democratic victories until Schwarzenegger became governor.
The Republican Party faces a battle it cannot win if the present situation continues. Key elements of the Republican coalition will demand action against what they view to be lawlessness that threatens social order, but if these elements succeed to forcing votes that are deemed to be anti-Hispanic, the demographic balance will swing in the direction of the Democrats in states that were at least competitive for the Republicans. President Bush has always prided himself in his success in reaching out to the Latino vote, especially in his home state of Texas.
I believe that Rove's solution to the dilemna is to recognize the reality that the United States will never find the political will to create border security that would staunch the flow of illegal immigration. If the people are going to come, then I believe the plan is to at least have them come formally in a "guest-worker" program. I also believe that part of the bill creating the guest worker program, a bill which I would not be surprised would be the centerpiece of the last two years of the Bush administration, will be a general amnesty leading to at least permanent residency for major portions of illegal immigrants already here. In order for these proposals to pass, a bone has to be thrown to anti-immigration elements within the Republican Party to avoid a revolt that would tear the party apart. The national ID card is part of this bone.
Even the article description is accurate saying the software is licensed under the MIT License. The SourceForge project site says that the project is under the MIT License. The source code says that its files are under the MIT License. The GNU Project web site says the X11 License is compatible with the GPL.
Help me out here in understanding why you could possibly have drawn a conclusion that there is any incompatibility with the GPL when there is not a single reference on the planet from any of the involved parties such as Adobe, MIT, or the GNU Project that claims such incompatibility. Explain why you have to share in a public forum something that is so obviously false and can be checked by anyone in one minute. Someone tell me why there is a continuous stream of licensing FUD towards licenses such as the MIT License.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading TFA, it states "The 1st Circuit said a new judge assigned to the case could reduce the award again, but the record labels would then be entitled to a new trial."
A new trial, even if only for damages, is the last thing the record labels should want. Each new trial increases the odds that some jury will award a token amount in effect removing effective civil sanction. Given that Jammie Thomas-Rasset had her penalty reduced to $54,000, it is likely even a new judge will reduce the penalty to well below $80,000. That's not an amount that will destroy someone like Joel Tenenbaum's life, especially since he's now a public figure and comes from what appears to be a relatively well-off family. At worst the penalty will be reduced to $70,000 and the RIAA will simply have to take that amount versus going to a new trial.
Considering that Joel Tenenbaum has now achieved some notoriety with this case, it is simply a matter of monetizing one's 15 minutes of fame. I don't think he will come close to monetizing it to $1 million, but I also suspect he won't have much of a problem monetizing his fame to basically feel no pain at all from the penalty. Note that in this worst-case scenario Tenenbaum pays the fine but has no other obligation, versus a settlement where the RIAA could demand he goes away forever and never speak in public of his experiences again. Writing a book, giving talks against the RIAA, all of these would remain open to him.
One may object that maybe Tenenbaum is not in this to monetize fame, but from my experience, the last thing serious research scientists at the beginning of their careers want is unrelated distractions. There are papers to publish, conferences to attend, jobs to apply for, etc. He must be getting something from this trial even at risk of this penalty to make the time spent well worth his while.
Relative to most other nations of the world, Holland is relatively well-run, and the Dutch are as capable of fixing such problems as anyone else.
Could the Dutch have an advantage that is somewhat a geographic accident, in that since the Middle Ages they have benefited from having an excellent source of Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D from herring? But the Dutch may have contributed to their own fortune by preparing and consuming herring in a manner that preserves nutrients. Note that under the section in Wikipedia describing pickled herring are listed several Northern European countries that are doing well and other groups with noted individuals of exceptional intelligence.
Once upon a time there was a country Germany that had the world leading technology in maglev trains. Unfortunately while the Germans had the technology, due to their regulatory system they could not actually build the systems in their own country, so they shopped their technology to a country that could, China.
The Chinese paid for building one demonstration system in Shanghai and seemed to be interested in paying for more maglev business from the Germans. Unfortunately after "public protests" of radiation further projects kept getting delayed so nothing was actually built. Then the Chinese developed their own maglev technology and no longer needed the Germans. The end.
On page 4 of Kenneth H. Rosen, Richard R. Rosinski, James M. Farber, and Douglas A. Host, UNIX System V Release 4: An Introduction, 2nd Edition, the subsection titled "Open Source Code" has the following first two sentences:
"The source code for the UNIX System, and not just the executable code, has been made available to users and programmers. Because of this, many people have been able to adapt the UNIX System in different ways. This openness has led to the introduction of a wide range of new features and versions customized to meet special needs."
The book by Rosen et al. cited above is has year of copyright 1996. There is apparently an earlier edition from 1990. This is no ordinary book by obscure authors--it was considered as one of the "bibles" for its subject at its time and would have been familiar to many. Already in the above description there are the crucial concepts of the importance of source code availability and adaptability.
No, the most predictable thing on Slashdot is posters who don't read the articles and who parrot the most popular opinion.
The article doesn't mention anything resembling terrorism as the reason. What the article discusses in some detail is that the Japanese ruling political party, the LDP, has ruled the country virtually unchallenged for decades. The slightest bit of thought shows that the LDP has achieved almost every single goal of what the most progressive Democrats are advocating in the United States: universal health care, effective mass transit, a constitutional ban against the use of the military except to defend the nation, unparalleled Internet connectivity and infrastructure, all within the framework of a liberal democracy. (And for many environmentalists, Japan has achieved the ideal of negative population growth.) As part of the system that rules Japan, college entrance exams are used as a filter to establish that those who ascend to rule Japan are part of a meritocracy. This and not terrorism is the context of Japanese concerns to save the children. As has been discussed by the Christian Science Monitor, the Japanese are probably far more willing to accept Internet filtering to protect the children out of fear of web sites that discuss topics such as group suicides.
And given that the Japanese system works better than almost any other in the world (only a few Western European nations even have an argument), a response of apathetic indifference by the majority ruled by that system is indeed perfectly rational and defensible. The bloggers who fear being censored represent the malcontents, the rejects, the people who were not quite good enough, the people who have not demonstrated their ability to responsibly maintain what the Japanese system has built to the envy of the rest of the world.
So why isn't Christine Boskoff going to be the clear winner for a Darwin Award? The person might have been extremely intelligent, but what can one say about a plan to climb remote mountains in China with only one companion and no method of communication to the outside world for weeks? As the Christine Boskoff Wikipedia article notes, she did not even leave word of where she was going so that potential rescue teams would have no idea where to find her.
So why is it funny when probably uneducated people do something stupid while it isn't funny for someone who used to be an "electrical engineer working for Lockheed Aeronautical in Georgia", "a pilot", and who "designed software for a lighted control display for the C-130J" to do something equally stupid to eliminate herself from the gene pool? Articles I have read such as the above article from 2002 indicate she had no children, so Christine Boskoff removed herself from the gene pool through her stupid actions. Evidently being a former electrical engineer and then becoming a mountain climber/entrepreneur is something that Darwinian evolution selects against. (Even her former husband killed himself in 1999.) So why aren't we all laughing at that?
The last refuge of modern sexists is the claim that even if men and women have the same average scores, men have a greater variance and therefore are more likely to produce the very top level mathematicians and scientists. For an example of the debate see Pinker vs. Spelke, or one could also read Dr. Elizabeth Spelke's papers including Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science: A critical review.
Christina Sormani has a web page explaining why Penny Smith is likely to have solved the Millenium Problem on the Navier-Stokes equation. Smith's paper is the culmination of a lifetime of research similar to how Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was a logical outcome of his previous research. This is not someone coming from out of nowhere providing a proof that has nothing to do with his or her prior specialty.
The debate is now over. Penny Smith has shown that there is in fact no variance between men and women that predisposes men to have the very top mathematicians. In fact the proof that environment trumps genetics has been demonstrated in the United States over the past decades: males born in the United States have been judged by government and industry to not be good enough in top-level mathematics which is why so much talent has to be imported from other countries. The United States is probably going to follow the path of the United Kingdom where cultural factors are causing boys mathematical achievement in school to collapse relative to that of girls.
Looking at product manuals for portable travel routers, I see lots of claims about "stateful packet inspection firewalls" and "NAT", but these only apply when the router is being used to share an Internet connection with the ethernet port connected not to one's laptop but to say a hotel's room connection.
Is there any of these products that does the following: I plug my laptop into the router's ethernet port, I am able to configure the router through its web interface, the router connects to a wireless access point, the router then functions as a router for my laptop providing hardware firewall services?
My dream machine (although it turned out to not be a machine) as a kid would have been an EVA from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I would not have had a qualm about even killing another kid if given an order to do so if obeying such orders was the price of being an EVA pilot. The power to level cities, and if in EVA Unit 01, power without limit, would be in my opinion the most common modern dream in the post video game younger generation, not peacefully flying on a jet-powered glider.
Nausicaa was a scientist who performed careful experiments that led her to her ultimate conclusions about the role of the deadly fungus and forest in the ecology of the post-apocalyptic world. Genre fiction since then has generally preferred to reject science as the mode of enlightenment, preferring anything else from heredity to magic.
I guess this point I am more a cynic about what young people really want if freed from the thin vaneer of civilization, similar to the philosophy of Lord of the Flies.
But would Ohmu's be forced to register with the government ...
Let's step back and consider why is it that things are the way they are. Telecom regulation is but one facet of various reforms that need to be carried out, but for some reason are not in most cases.
I argue that Francis Fukuyama completely misread what he called "The End of History"--the late 20th century was not the triumph of what he called liberal democracy but its rejection. The 21st century then will be various countries dealing with the consequences.
Western Europe I would argue is re-creating not the Roman Empire but the Catholic Church, only a secular version in its bureacracy. Thus Europe's new Church will once again be the fusion of the functions of moral guidance, legal enforcement, and scientific research.
The United States has no historic fallback position and will simply continue to deteriorate in the effectiveness of its regulation of anything. There is period of its history that could be used to revitalize it, but it is generally forbidden to teach that a major plank of the Progressive movement was greatly restricted immigration.
The central Indian belief appears to me to be fatalism, which has advantages in that there is no illusion that there is any chance of fair outcomes for the masses. However fatalism is not exactly the most conducive philosophy for summoning the national will to have a functioning government.
But the country in the strongest position is China, for its defining literature is free of the illusions that plagued both the Catholic Church and its successor the European bureacracy, the confusion that what is moral has to agree with what is true. China will be led by people who, even if they have not read the work, are influenced by the ideas of works such as Romance of Three Kingdoms.
I suggest the Chinese idea of the cycle of rise and decline of empire is at its heart a protest against what seemed to be the deadlock that the only people who had the power to end hereditary rule were the people who when they achieved power would simply reimpose it to favor their own offspring. If the current regime has solved that problem then it will be China that has the greatest alignment of its form of government with the truth and not what one wishes to be true. For the Chinese are the ones who feel the least constraint towards the sacrifice of oceans of blood to achieve the needs of the state.
Richard D. Parsons, Chairman and CEO of Time Warner
So Hollywood needs to be bolder and make more movies like Transporter 2? :-)
Debian/kFreeBSD has its web site's pages copyrighted by SPI, web pages which mention that "Debian" is a registered trademark without mentioning the status of "FreeBSD".
But the people I blame are the directors of the FreeBSD Foundation which now owns the FreeBSD trademark at least as far as it applies to "CD ROMs featuring an archive of computer programs which may be accessed for use archived on a CDROM." (And it appears the FreeBSD Foundation is working to expand the applicability of the FreeBSD trademark.) But there is already a Debian/kFreeBSD iso.
Considering that a simple cease and desist was sufficient to force CentOS to scrub references on its web site to the phrase "Red Hat" and other such trademarks (other than apparently a link to someone else's article), I am baffled what either Debian/kFreeBSD or the FreeBSD Foundation is waiting for.
Wrong root cause--the blame lies with the left and their reaction to the Vietnam War, with their one permanent reform the destruction of basic research in United States universities through the Mansfield Amendment. Just go to the musty bookshelves of one's university to the mathematics section and look for books before 1970. Many of them will have an acknowledgement of funding through some agency such as the Office of Navel Research.
The Mansfield Amendment deliberately destroyed the relationship between the United States military and university basic research, so that instead of getting crumbs from a gargantuan Department of Defense budget, which meant the crumbs were quite substantial, basic research had to rely on the politically castrated National Science Foundation with no important constituency to push for funding.
Faced with the prospect of basic research almost completely disappearing, the only alternative was something similar to Bayh-Dole, because there was no way anymore to politically push through explicit funding. What an irony that now what were once considered public goods are now the property of the largest corporations and the rich only get richer. Now that is the true unintended consequence considering who initiated the Mansfield Amendment.
If HP killed the Alpha, explain this press release from Intel dated June 25, 2001, announcing that "Compag will transfer key enterprise processor technology to Intel and consolidate its entire 64-bit server family on the Itanium architecture." Not only was it announced the Alpha processor line was going to be killed, but Compaq management made sure the decision could not be reversed.
According to the press release, there was only going to be one more generation of the the Alpha, and the transition was supposed to be completed by 2004.
Note the bullet point further down in the press release that "Compaq is transferring significant Alpha microprocessor and compiler technology, tools and resources to Intel." As explained further in the press release, "Over the next couple of years, several hundred Compaq microprocessor engineers, compiler experts and infrastructure employees will be offered employment with Intel."
Compaq before the HP merger had agreed with Intel to transfer all of the engineers. There was absolutely nothing HP could have done to have saved the Alpha even if HP had had a sudden conversion and decided to reject the Itanium. HP would have had to have started from scratch with the IP and people already transferred to Intel--it probably would not have been legally possible for HP to have changed direction at that point.
The idea of a censorship-free society is a pure fantasy, and it is the consensus of almost everyone on the planet in the 21st century that some forms of censorship are necessary.
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. For example, see the case of Oriana Fallaci. Now she may or may not be eventually ruled to have committed defamatory speech against Islam, but the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions. As for the case of Europe, I predict this line will be drawn more and more in the direction that no speech critical of Islam will be permitted.
In the 21st century, almost everyone, regardless of civilization, accepts that there is no such principle as the unlimited right to publish any book.
Similarly in the 21st century, there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned. For an example, Belgium's highest court ruled that the Vlaams Blok is racist and banned it from political participation. Again, there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed. In the case of Europe, I predict the line will be drawn where it will be illegal for a political party to advocate anti-immigrant positions.
The environmental movement is a real political movement and actually has politicians pay attention to it from time to time because it can find people who are willing to take on the corporations in a courtroom.
A prime example is the case of the McDonalds libel trial which turned into a major public relations disaster for McDonalds and for the government and which has some aspects still dragging on.
Note that due to the nature of England's libel laws even the pair involved in the litigation knew they had no chance of prevailing at trial; but they chose to sacrifice a huge chunk of their life because the damage done to them is far exceeded by the damage the movement could inflict on McDonalds.
The difference then boils down to this--some people view causes such as the environment as being important enough to sacrifice their lives for. These people and their movement get results. Far fewer seem to feel that the concept of digital rights is important enough to sacrifice one's livelihood. I view the political system we have today is an arena of Darwinism for ideologies--survival of the fittest, the ones that can inspire people to make actual sacrifices.
I learned how cockroaches were naturals for running machines from the movie Godzilla vs Gigan.
The specs are open but the license file for the API specification specifically grants only the right to implement the entirety of it, and only if the implementation also passes the TCK. There is no other right to use the API specification other than for "internal use" to be able to write programs that are not re-implementations. The effort to achieve total compliance is simply beyond what anyone can achieve without the ability to reach intermediate steps. But those intermediate steps violate the license of the API specification by not being complete.
What should in my opinion be alarming is that Sun has specifically mentioned a Residual Knowledge right for its otherwise "read only" JCK that is not mentioned at all in the license file for the API specification. That means that Sun considers one to have no Residual Knowledge right after having read the API specification. Anyone who reads the API specification is tainted unless the implementation is 100% complete and passes the TCK, which isn't going to happen soon, or ever. This is the same clever strategy that Sun has used of spreading the source code to taint as many developers as possible. And while GNU Classpath and Apache Harmony can probably succeed in documenting that developers aren't tainted from having viewed the source code, there is no way they will be able to argue that all of the developers are also untainted with respect to the having read the API specification.
I think the ground is being laid for a straightforward copyright violation lawsuit to defend the API specification should a release ever be made of either GNU Classpath or Apache Harmony. There is no way either project will achieve complete compliance, and there's only so long they can claim they are "pre-released" products, especially if they are being widely installed and used as dependencies in open source distributions.
You might not think Sun can win such a lawsuit, but it doesn't really matter now does it from an individual developer's perspective if one doesn't have the legal resources to fight back.
Geir Magnusson Jr. claims in the FAQ that "While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons." Looking at the license files for the API specification of J2SE 5.0 versus J2SE v1.4.2, I'm not sure what the difference is. It seems to me that there is still a requirement that one implement every specified class, and only every specified class, and that one passes the TCK. Apache Harmony claims that they will be able to apply for access to the TCK under the exception for non-profits, but what if Sun doesn't see things their way? Without passing the TCK, a project doesn't seem to have any right to implement the API.
Before implementing the specification exactly and passing the TCK, there can never be an official release of Apache Harmony. I think this project is hopeless.
To paraphrase the new Battlestar Galactica, "The war is over. We lost."
The goal of the RIAA/MPAA isn't to eliminate Internet distribution, it is to preserve their ability to make money off of the content and their monopoly over distribution rights. Unauthorized Internet distribution currently plays into their hands by making their products more popular without giving those distributing it the means to make much money. There is no evidence of a decrease in DVD sales or any other revenue source that feeds RIAA/MPAA profits.
What the RIAA/MPAA really fears is an equivalent of a new Microsoft for content and Internet distribution that would make enough money that it could dictate terms to the RIAA/MPAA. Thanks to unauthorized filesharing of the RIAA and MPAA's most popular products, such a new Microsoft cannot and will not happen. In addition, the ready availability of RIAA/MPAA products to those who desire them but do not wish to pay for them means that no effective political movement can develop to change the laws that would permits others to profit from distribution.
The RIAA and MPAA still have their monopoly over authorized distribution that can make money, and they still have their de facto eternal copyrights. Nothing in the conceivable future is going to change that. They won the war.
I suspect the motivation behind the national ID card is a far-sighted effort by Karl Rove to tend to the health of the Republican Party.
Under the current system, there is enough leakage at the border to allow a flood of illegal immigration into the United States. The Democrats over the next few decades plan to force confrontations at the state level to gradually de facto legalize these immigrants, plus using the political battles to win a huge voting block. I think both Karl Rove and the Democrats for example believe that the victories of anti-illegal immigrant propositions in California paved the way for an backlash that resulted in Democratic victories until Schwarzenegger became governor.
The Republican Party faces a battle it cannot win if the present situation continues. Key elements of the Republican coalition will demand action against what they view to be lawlessness that threatens social order, but if these elements succeed to forcing votes that are deemed to be anti-Hispanic, the demographic balance will swing in the direction of the Democrats in states that were at least competitive for the Republicans. President Bush has always prided himself in his success in reaching out to the Latino vote, especially in his home state of Texas.
I believe that Rove's solution to the dilemna is to recognize the reality that the United States will never find the political will to create border security that would staunch the flow of illegal immigration. If the people are going to come, then I believe the plan is to at least have them come formally in a "guest-worker" program. I also believe that part of the bill creating the guest worker program, a bill which I would not be surprised would be the centerpiece of the last two years of the Bush administration, will be a general amnesty leading to at least permanent residency for major portions of illegal immigrants already here. In order for these proposals to pass, a bone has to be thrown to anti-immigration elements within the Republican Party to avoid a revolt that would tear the party apart. The national ID card is part of this bone.
Even the article description is accurate saying the software is licensed under the MIT License. The SourceForge project site says that the project is under the MIT License. The source code says that its files are under the MIT License. The GNU Project web site says the X11 License is compatible with the GPL.
Help me out here in understanding why you could possibly have drawn a conclusion that there is any incompatibility with the GPL when there is not a single reference on the planet from any of the involved parties such as Adobe, MIT, or the GNU Project that claims such incompatibility. Explain why you have to share in a public forum something that is so obviously false and can be checked by anyone in one minute. Someone tell me why there is a continuous stream of licensing FUD towards licenses such as the MIT License.
In old Soviet Russia, you don't violate license, license violates you! :-)